New Japanese Mobile Game Offers The Chance To Earn Real Bitcoins.

A new Japanese game known as Itadaki Dungeon rewards adventurers with snippets of real-time bitcoin and is gaining rapidly in popularity.

Stashed among the 3,000 courses that a player needs to navigate are micro bitcoin payments that reward players for achieving in-game goals. A hybrid app for both iOS and Android users, Itadaki Dungeon, is a free game that features thousands of underground levels with both dangers and rewards along the way.

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Populating the 2D courses of the game are monsters that need to be subdued using a variety of weapons and tools. Emulating Dungeons & Dragons in many ways the settings are medieval and often appropriately dungeon-esque.

A whole new incentive to gaming

The company behind the launch, Atstage Inc., has followed a still-novel emerging trend among Japanese video game makers, where cryptocurrency rewards incentivize players.In a gaming-mad country, many modern Japanese fun mobile apps and games now reward users with tiny bits of virtual currency.

Atstage’s game emulates the protocols of Bitcoinbandit, a mobile game that rewards players in mBTC (millibitcoin, or thousandths of a bitcoin). In Bitcoinbandit, as soon as a player enters tournament mode, the earning potential begins, and skilled players that attain high ranking can earn more significant amounts.

Another game with a similar operating model is Counterstrike Global Offense which pays out digital coin rewards in Digibyte. The altcoin network behind the game Spells of Genesis also has inbuilt cryptocurrency rewards.

Arguably the most definitive and emblematic Japanese gaming experience, Pokémon, has the PBBG game Pokébits that also allows players to earn bitcoin. Therein, familiar Pokemon arenas appear and allow players to complete missions for bitcoin, in reduced increments termed satoshis.

Atstage’s offering comes replete with a suitably foreboding setting, swords, hammers and guns that players can employ to beat off hungry monsters that try to eat them. As a player navigates levels, small bitcoins appear, and the player’s character grabs them and stores them along with other game items collected. In a country widely seen as an Asian moderate, incentivizing games with digital currency seems purely logical. Although offering only micro-amounts of BTC, players typically waste no time in becoming proficient and collecting as much free virtual currency as they can.

Digital is as digital does

Atstage’s latest 2D mobile game release scored a 4.1 rating on both the iOS App Store and Google Play. Previous releases like Itadaki Street and Dragon Quest from the same stable have created wide reception for the latest offering. The game structure and graphics are similar, and in Itadaki Dungeon, a player traverses relatively simple but dangerous pathways to access a stairwell that leads to the next level down.

The official blurb from the developers is:

“Test your skills in an expansive dungeon with 3,000 underground levels.” The game currently fixes bitcoin payouts on the 400th of the 3,000 courses.

Adding to the excitement, once a player has enabled a BTC symbol to appear on screen, only then are they notified as to how much their grab is worth. Although the game is free, the payments are unlikely to make any overnight Japanese millionaires, as the reward values are tiny. That said, free is free, and the game that represents an emerging trend in Asia has already proven immensely popular.